Discussion Group Report

"Down through the ages, philosophers and poets, politicians and theologians, friends and strangers have argued about the nature of happiness. They haven't been able to settle on what happiness is exactly, but that hasn't kept them from chasing it down. In the end, and the beginning, too, happiness may be a lot easier to experience than to define," says Darrin M. McMahon in "The Quest for Happiness" in the Wilson Quarterly of winter, 2005.

The importance of the role of happiness in our lives has changed through the eras of history.

Hegel believed it was the fate of great men like himself to be denied "what is commonly called happiness." The periods of happiness in history are blank pages, he concluded.

What is this thing called happiness? Many of us today would likely be quick to describe it as a good feeling or positive mood. But the first taxonomist of the emotions, Aristotle, excluded happiness from his classifications. In the Rhetoric he posited that the list includes anger, love, enmity, fear, pity, indignation, envy and contempt. Happiness is apparently something else, "a certain kind of activity of the soul expressing virtue." Happiness is nothing so cheap as a fleeting feeling or a passing fancy. It entails "a complete life," lived according to virtue and measured right up to its end. Until that end, a tragic turn or a cowardly choice might bring shame or misfortune on a life otherwise well spent. The Greek statesman Solon averred, "Call no man happy until he is dead."

Aristotle's view of happiness as a universal moral end was widely shared in the ancient world, among both the Greeks and the Romans. Though they granted that pleasure and good feeling might have a place in a happy life, the principal element was thought to be virtue, which frequently demanded discipline, sacrifice and even pain. Cicero thought virtue was so indispensable that, if a man possessed it, he could be happy regardless of the circumstances, even while being tortured. Though this was taking matters to the extreme, it illustrates how ancient thinkers considered happiness a thing apart, not a sentiment or a passion or an emotional state.

Kant conceded that, although everyone wishes to attain happiness, he can never say definitely and consistently what it is he really wishes and wills. Thus it could never be a reliable guide to evaluating moral action. Apparently historians have reasoned along similar lines, concluding that happiness is not a useful category of inquiry. But this is a perilous assumption. "How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness," William James observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure." His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, maintained that happiness is something "essentially subjective." "Though all men aim at being happy," John Locke concluded, they take "various and contrary ways in pursuit of that end, down as many paths as there are palates."

"But what if one were to consider happiness not as a private emotion or a universal moral end but rather as an idea?" McMahon asks. "Doing so would allow one to treat this mysterious yearning like any other abstract notion--freedom, justice, or truth--evaluating ideas of happiness as they have taken shape and evolved over time, tracing their genealogy, and following their representations in different cultural contexts." If we acknowledge this concept of happiness, it would not surprise us that Marx and Engels considered happiness an integral part of their system, nothing less than the solution to the riddle of history. Marx observed, "The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness."

But he never revealed what "real happiness" might entail. What is revealing is his insistence that we can attain it on our own, in the space once occupied by God. A similar emphasis had long occupied the Greeks. Aristotle's attempt to locate happiness in virtue was part of a broader effort to wrest happiness from forces over which we have little or no control: fate, the gods, the movement of the stars.

But Socrates ran up against the old and very widespread "tragic tradition of happiness," The belief that happiness is ultimately out of our hands--controlled by fortune, fate or the gods; governed by the movement of the stars, the actions of our ancestors or the whims of occult forces and spirits. This appears to be the common feature of all traditional cultures. For many in the classical world, even those of perfect virtue, happiness was something that could never be entirely controlled. This connection of happiness with fortune, chance or fate persisted into the High Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Happiness was what happens to us.

By Shakespeare's time, all discussion of happiness had been shaped by another powerful force: Christianity. An elaborate theology promised unending ecstasy as the reward for earthly privation. Because of our first parents' original transgression in the Garden of Eden, true happiness was "unattainable in our present life." Death was the true happiness of the elect. Thomas Aquinas called imperfect happiness a pale imitation of our heavenly reward.

Not until the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries were considerable numbers of men and women exposed to the possibility that they might legitimately hope for happiness everlasting in this life. To construct happiness in a place of our own making was not to defy God's will but to live as nature intended. This was our earthly purpose, and in a world governed by natural laws liberated from the capricious whims of an angry deity or the chaos of fortune, this purpose was realizable. Thomas Jefferson summarized a century of reflection on the subject in Europe and America by stating that the "pursuit of happiness" was a "self-evident" truth. The "greatest happiness for the greatest number" had become the moral imperative of the century. However he said nothing in the Declaration of Independence about the right to attain happiness; he restricted himself to its pursuit. He was pessimistic that the chase would ever be brought to a satisfying conclusion because of calamities and misfortunes that greatly afflict all of us. The preamble to the French revolutionaries' "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" in 1789 pledged to work for the "happiness of everyone." This promise was made a mockery of by Robespierre's Reign of Terror, but the line was nonetheless indicative of a dramatic shift in the nature of human expectations.

In spite of the skepticism of some observers such as Alexis deTocqueville and Thomas Carlyle, a new god was taking shape. Earthly happiness was emerging as the idol of idols, the locus of meaning in life, the source of human aspiration, the purpose of existence, the why and the wherefore. Yet belief in happiness, like an older belief in God, is a type of faith, an assumption about the meaning and purpose of human existence that is a relatively recent development in human affairs. But we have come to assume that people ought to be happy and that, if they're not, there's something wrong. As that assumption collides with the often painful realities of existence, we see clearly what an article of faith it is.

Along with the strides now being made in the scientific understanding of mood and the tendency to pathologize, says McMahon, our post-Enlightenment faith inevitably pushes us in the direction of compensating for nature when nature fails us in the pursuit of our natural end. If happiness is not, as Freud said, "in the plan of 'Creation,'" there are those ready to alter the handiwork of our maker to put it there. That was the great fear of Aldous Huxley, for whom genetic engineering and psychopharmacology harnessed in the service of happiness constituted two of the most chilling features of the dystopia he created in Brave New World. As pointed out in the report by Leon Kass and the President's Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the science of mood enhancement is upon us and is rapidly outpacing our readiness to think through its ethical implications. The council members argue for increased moral reflection to help us understand our situation today and discern what might lie ahead."

Philosopher Pascal Bruckner has observed, "Happiness is the sole horizon of our contemporary democracies".

"To bring that vision into better focus," says McMahon, "we must take up Hegel's neglected challenge to 'contemplate history from the point of view of happiness.' We must conceive the history of all hitherto-existing society as a history of the struggle for happiness."